Western leaders urge arms manufacturing in Ukraine

The New York Times features an article on the need for manufacturing weapons in Ukraine to meet the nation's need. Calliber.Az reprints the article.

The chief of NATO and the defence ministers of UK and France have paid surprise visits to Kyiv, announced on September 28, in a show of continued solidarity, even as they emphasise the goal of pumping up weapons production within Ukraine.

Conscious of softening Western support for the expensive business of arming Ukraine, officials are billing expansion of Ukraine’s own arms industry as needed economic development for a war-tattered country, according to The New York Times.

It is also a potentially lucrative prospect for Western weapons makers, albeit a risky one in a country bombarded daily by Russia; Moscow’s forces launched dozens of exploding drones into Ukraine overnight, the Ukrainian government said, but there were no reports of casualties or serious damage.

“It will be an important opportunity for Ukrainian companies to forge new partnerships with the industry across the alliance and beyond,” Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, said at a news conference with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. “The stronger Ukraine becomes, the closer we come to ending Russia’s aggression.”

The visits came a day before a forum with international military contractors, convened by the Ukrainian government, which hopes they will join in developing the industrial capacity to build and repair weapons in Ukraine. Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign affairs minister, said the event would bring together representatives of 165 companies from 26 nations.

Western countries are having trouble meeting their arms commitments to Ukraine, notably for artillery ammunition, and are depleting their own stocks faster than they can be replenished. Military industries that have shrunk since the Cold War have struggled to retool and find adequate supplies of materials to ramp up production to their full capacity — and even that is not enough. The US military has signed contracts for companies to build two new production lines for making artillery shells, and another for filling them with explosives.

After meeting with President Biden last week, Mr. Zelenskyy said he had sealed a “long-term agreement” with the US for joint weapons production, but a White House statement was more circumspect, saying that the Biden administration would host a conference in the coming months “to explore options for joint ventures and co-production.”

Mr. Zelenskyy’s penchant for ambitious pronouncements was on view again, when he said of his meeting with Mr. Stoltenberg, “Today it is already a conversation between de facto allies and it is only a matter of time before Ukraine becomes a de jure member of the Alliance.”

How realistic that is remains unclear. Though NATO has stated that Ukrainian membership is a long-term goal, Western officials have said it is still a far-off prospect, and cannot be seriously considered until after the war.
The UK government revealed that Grant Shapps, its new defence secretary, had met a day earlier with Mr. Zelenskyy and the new Ukrainian defence minister, Rustem Umerov, to discuss military support, in particular bolstering Ukraine’s air defences.

Mr. Zelenskyy also met with Sébastien Lecornu, France’s defence minister, who made clear that development of Ukrainian weapons manufacturing was a commercial opportunity as well as a military goal, and told reporters that he had come accompanied by some 20 representatives of the French defence industry in fields as diverse as robots, drones, artillery and artificial intelligence.

“It’s also a way for us to stay the course and establish French interests in Kyiv and Ukraine over the long term,” he said. “We know that this war is going to last,” he said.

The idea is that over time, Mr. Lecornu said, there will be fewer outright gifts of weapons to Ukraine and more sales — sometimes with subsidies. In December, Mr. Lecornu said that France had launched a 200 million euro ($211 million) “innovative fund” allowing Ukraine to purchase weapons from French industrials.